


cola with the burnt out taste (laid bare)

by viscrael



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Pre-Slash, Set during season 3, Spoilers, haircuts and late night conversations, just. lance and keith growing closer as paladins, let! keith! cry!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 16:13:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11740587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viscrael/pseuds/viscrael
Summary: “Keith,” Lance says.“What?” He whirls around to Lance, scowling harshly, but it's a poor imitation of his usual glare. Lance can recognize when it's genuine irritation at him and when it's only misdirected; he's started to scratch the surface of decoding Keith's facial expressions and body language, and he knows enough to recognize that this is not annoyance.This is badly concealed grieving.“It's okay to not be fine right now.”--keith and lance try to get used to shiro being gone.





	cola with the burnt out taste (laid bare)

**Author's Note:**

> *busts down door* **dreamworks holy FUCK**
> 
> anyway whomstve else here was literaly killed by s3 but like in a good way bc i know i sure as heck was!!! i loved it!!! so much!!! there arent enough words to express how much i enjoyed this season and how excited i already am for s4 ahhhhhhhhh
> 
> but smth that kept bothering me the whole time is that. there HAD to be time b/t them losing shiro and them finding him again that we didnt see. there HAD to be moments we didnt c of them becoming more like actual friends and lance acting as keiths right hand man. so this idea wldnt leave me alone andddd ive technically been working on this since s3 dropped (which was. to be fair. only like 4 days ago holy fuck) but i didnt finish it until just now bc im . horrible
> 
> anyway! obvs s3 spoilers. i bullshat some stuff abt how long shiro was absent bc no matter WHAT any1 says there is NO way in hell it was only a week that he was gone. nope. not happening. 
> 
> have some boys being sad but also sort of friends

“Hey.”

The door to the observation deck slides open for Lance as he enters, shutting behind him quietly. He stands at the doorway, watching Keith, whose back is to the door. His head is tilted up as he stares at a map projected around the room.

“Uh, hey,” Keith says, more of a mumble than anything. He glances over his shoulder at Lance, but his eyes seem to flicker past him, busy somewhere else. He's been like that since they lost Shiro. Distracted, spacey. Distant. He turns back to the hologram he was studying.

Keith asks, “What do you want?”

“Nothing, really.” Lance slides up next to him, looking at the map. He vaguely recognizes it from when Coran showed them where they were headed next, but for the life of him he can't remember what name Coran gave the system. The alien names get mixed up in his head sometimes. It gets hard to remember everything.

Keith doesn't respond to that. He's still looking at the map, and from the corner of his eye, Lance watches Keith raise his hand up and rub his forehead as if he has a headache. He's still wearing his everyday clothes, gloves included. Everyone was given extra clothing, sleepwear included, when they became paladins, but Lance can't remember seeing Keith wear the complementary pajamas even once.

“Do you sleep in that?” Lance asks suddenly. Keith blinks and lowers his hand from his forehead.

“What?”

“Do you sleep in those clothes?” He takes his hands out of his pants pocket and gestures as he talks. “You know, what you're wearing right now? I've never seen you in anything but that besides, you know, your armor, so it just got me wondering...”

“Sometimes,” Keith answers, shrugging. He looks away from Lance, training his eyes back on the image. A tiny icon meant to represent their ship floats slowly across the map, tracking them in real time. “If I forget to change.”

“Gross,” Lance says without thinking about it. It really wasn't meant as rudely as it came out—it's only that Lance has always been a pretty hygienic person, so the concept of sleeping in the clothes you wore during the day is bizarre to him.

Keith bristles. “Did you have a real reason for bothering me, or did you just come to be an asshole?”

“Actually, I did,” Lance snaps.

“Then what _was_ it?”

It feels silly to say it now that they've fallen back into arguing, and he hesitates. He sighs quietly, shoving his hands back in his pockets and looking away. “I just wanted to check up on you. You know, see how you're doin'.”

“How I'm doing,” Keith repeats slowly.

“Yeah.” Lance nods. “You know. With...everything.”

They look at each other for a moment, Lance trying to communicate silently what he means. Understanding flashes in Keith's eyes, and then his face falls, his eyebrows furrowing harshly. He turns back to the map and mumbles, “I'm fine.”

“Are you? Because it really doesn't _seem_ like you're—“

“I'm _fine_.”

The ship's icon moves forward at a snail's pace. Around the icon, the holographic planets spin on their axes, most much slower than the ship can move, but a few getting near its speed. The map is huge, spreading out across the length of most of the room. Lance is reminded of the murder board back at Keith's shack before they left, of the calculated, if not slightly compulsive way he went about discovering more about the Blue lion's energy and Shiro's arrival.

Is that what he's trying to do now, Lance wonders? Plot enough things down in hopes that he can recreate that night in the desert so many months ago? Or is it now only desperation making him search every inch of the solar systems they visit, sliding over every planet and asteroid belt with such a fine-toothed comb that they couldn't leave a rock unturned?

Not that the rest of them don't want to find him just as badly, of course. Just that the rest of them aren't staying up into odd hours of the night, staring at maps in almost complete darkness as everyone else in the castle sleeps.

“Keith,” Lance says.

“ _What_?” He whirls around to Lance, scowling harshly, but it's a poor imitation of his usual glare. Lance can recognize when it's genuine irritation at him and when it's only misdirected; he's started to scratch the surface of decoding Keith's facial expressions and body language, and he knows enough to recognize that this is not annoyance.

This is badly concealed grieving.

“It's okay to not be fine right now.”

There’s a brief moment before his eyes dart away where they only look at each other. Keith’s eyes go so wide, his expression open in shock, his mouth parted softly. In the near darkness his eyes look so dark, almost purple in color, and Lance looks back, noticing this not for the first time.

Then the moment ends. He shuts his mouth closed, narrowing his eyes back to an almost-scowl, and insists, “I know that.”

Lance wonders if he’s ever had someone there to teach him that, someone there to let him _know_ that it’s okay to not be fine sometimes. He wonders if that “someone” was Shiro, would still be Shiro, and then wonders what exactly the two are to each other. How long they’ve been in each other’s lives. How long Shiro has been Keith’s only family. He thinks about what he would do if he lost someone in his family only to get them back an entire year later and then lose them a second time. If he would be able to bear it. If he’d ever be able to deny that he wasn’t “fine” by any stretch of the word. If he would feel alone, no matter how many people were around him; if he would shut himself off, lash out and misdirect grief as anger, confusion as irritation, depression as distance.

“Do you?” Lance asks, not unkindly. He’s thinking about the look on Keith’s face the first night they found Shiro, right before the two of them helped maneuver his unconscious body to Keith’s hoverbike, and the look on his face when they found Black’s cockpit completely empty, and the look he’s trying desperately to cover up right now, the wide-eyed, open-mouthed shock of having another person call him out on his façade. And then he’s thinking about the fact that for an entire year Keith probably didn’t have a single person who cared enough to call him out.

“Why do you keep asking?” Keith asks. Grief as anger.

“Because none of us have been ‘fine’ the past three weeks,” Lance says, “but at least none of us have been _pretending_ we were.”

That strikes some cord with him somewhere, and he stiffens. “You don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“ _It_ ,” he bites. “How—how it is! What it’s like! All of you have just been goofing off, acting like Shiro isn’t gone, like things are somehow still normal!”

“Of course things aren’t normal, but that doesn’t mean we just stop waking up every day!”

Something flickers across Keith’s expression then, some emotion Lance can’t pinpoint. Then he’s back to his misdirected anger, his almost-there-but-not-quite-scowl, and he grits his teeth harshly, his hands clenching and unclenching into fists by his sides.

“Whatever,” he mumbles. His fists clench one last time, and for a second Lance thinks he’s going to start an actual fight—but Keith only turns his back to Lance and starts towards the door. “I’m going to bed.”

“For real?”

“Yeah. And you should too. It’s late.”

The door shuts behind him. Lance is left watching his retreating form. He says to the empty space, “That was my line.”

That went about as well as he expected, all things considered. At least it looked like he was getting his point across to him, Lance thinks, if only for a second there.

 

\--

 

They spend three weeks looking for Shiro before accepting that they need to find someone to pilot Black.

Keith is the most insistent that they don’t give up. Lance gets it. All of them want Shiro back, obviously—all of them fought with him, all of them love him, all of them miss him, would give anything to have him back, to have him safe and here again. Keith is not the only person feeling loss here, but he is the only one feeling it so _viscerally_.

There is no crying. Or, if there is, Lance doesn't see it. Not from Keith.

What he does see is anger and a desperation that feels somehow both new and a hundred years old, even as Keith argues with Allura on where next to search. Without Voltron to fall back on, they're having to be a lot more cautious in choosing which planets they can visit. No one is _happy_ about having to put the search aside in some cases, but Keith is the only one actively angered by it. Most of his arguments with Allura and the team bleed into one another, the same points and rebuttals that come down to the fact that they can’t form Voltron without the very person they’re looking for.

Keith storms off after a particularly bad fight. Lance watches him go, and thinks about the murder board.

 

\--

 

“I fucked up.”

“We know you fucked up,” Lance says patiently. “But there's nothing we can do about that now but try to make it better. And try not to fuck up again in the future.”

 

\--

 

“You think there are any other planets out there with sodas?”

Lance asks it while they’re in the castle’s kitchen. He’s rummaging through the fridge for something to drink while Keith halfheartedly picks at a plate of food Hunk and Coran prepared for dinner. When they finally returned to the castle after some diplomatic work, everyone was too tired to cook anything new, so it’s leftovers tonight. Lance is always in favor of not wasting resources, so he’s perfectly fine with this. He settles on a container of juice and straightens back up, closing the fridge door.

“I don’t know,” Keith says, giving Lance a weird look. “Why would you wonder that?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I could really go for a root beer right now, and I mean, Altea was a hundred times ahead of Earth in terms of technology ten thousand years before we even showed up, right? So _some_ planet out there’s gotta have discovered the beauty that is soda or at least a soda-like thing, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“C’mon, man, work with me here.” Lance leans back against the fridge, crossing his ankle over the other.

Keith sighs, but it looks like he’s almost smiling. He prods at a few space peas on his plate with his fork. “I _guess_ ,” he relents.

“Solid answer,” Lance says. “But a little safe. I’d wager there’s, like, a ninety-nine percent chance someone else out here has made a soda-like drink. I think it’s just a matter of finding out where we can get it from, what with how big space is.”

“And what, you’re gonna search for it?”

“I am now.”

Keith snorts and sets his fork down on his plate. He’s stopped playing with his food finally, but he’s still not eating any of it either, and this fact is not lost on Lance.

Lance nods his head towards the plate. “You done?”

“What?”

“With your dinner. You’ve, like, barely touched it, man.”

“Oh.” Keith looks at his plate. He shrugs, his movements stilted. “Just don’t have much of an appetite tonight, I guess.”

“Ah,” Lance says.

He wants to push the topic, but he thinks maybe that would be…weird of him. Normally, Lance wouldn’t care about looking invasive or anything, he’d only want the person to know that he’s worried and thinking about them, that he’s noticed when they’re neglecting to take care of themself the way that Keith is. But he doesn’t know if they’re close enough for him to say something like that, for him to make it so blatant that he’s noticed and he’s concerned.

It’s been a month since Keith took over being leader, and the team has fallen into a weird equilibrium. It isn’t perfect; if Lance is being completely honest, it’s barely stable at all—but it’s definitely better than nothing.

Flying Red has been a surprisingly jolting experience for Lance. It wasn’t like he thought switching lions was going to somehow be easy, or that all the lions flew the same or responded the same, but he didn’t realize just _how_ different it was. Red feels…weird to talk to. Blue is all purring and cool, deep tones and advice and suggestions and an assurance that reminds Lance of his mother, somehow. Blue speaks to him even when they aren’t in battle, asks him how his day was, what he’s been up to, if things are alright with the other paladins; Blue is invested in him and isn’t afraid to show that she is.

Red, on the other hand, is mostly silent unless they’re flying. She doesn’t greet Lance with conversation when he enters her hangar outside of an energy that he knows means she’s recognized he’s there. She doesn’t purr nearly as much. She barely speaks to him, in fact, and when she does she’s nothing like Blue. She lives up to her namesake: everything about her is red, temperamental and reserved like Keith, impulsive and explosive and stubborn.

For the first few days, Lance wondered desperately why it was Red was so insistent on _him_ piloting her when Allura, the daughter of the original Red paladin and a highly skilled fighter and strategist, was available and willing. It wasn’t until Coran explained it to him, after they’d fallen for Lotor’s bait and Keith almost got them completely separated because he wouldn’t listen, that he understood.

_As Red, you’re Keith’s right hand_ , Coran said, and Lance thought back to the times, even then when it was still so new, that he’d been forced to be Keith’s voice of reason.

It made a little bit more sense then.

But despite being Keith’s impulse control for the moment, Lance still doesn’t know if they would consider themselves “friends” yet. He’s a little scared to push it. Scared that if he prods this hardly-established stability they’re in, if he acknowledges the changes, Keith will freak out and retreat into himself the way he always does, and the tightrope their relationship is walking will snap under them.

Lance is scared they’ll return to square one.

“My family and I used to drink, like, exclusively soda,” Lance says.

Keith’s head shoots up from where he’d been looking at his plate in their silence. “What?”

“When I was growing up,” Lance clarifies. “It was pretty bad for us, honestly? Like, people really aren’t supposed to drink soda that often. I found out how bad that much sugar is for you when I was a teenager and stopped drinking it unless it was a party or something, but my family still all drinks it—or drank it. Drunk? Drunken?”

“I think it’s ‘drank’,” Keith provides.

“Thanks. Drank it, then. We had this space in our kitchen where we kept all the drinks that didn’t need to be in the fridge until they were opened, and it spread basically across the length of the wall. What was worse is that we’d go through a liter a day most of the time. But that’s partially ‘cause there were eight of us in one house.”

“Jesus,” Keith mumbles. “That’s a…lot of people.”

“Right? And there was one bathroom between me and all my siblings, too.”

“I can’t imagine living with that many people,” Keith says. He sets his plate aside on the counter he’s leaning against and crosses his arms over his chest, but somehow it doesn’t feel as much like he’s retreating into himself. Usually when he does that, it means he’s trying to keep himself hidden, close himself off. But he does it now while offering something about himself, and Lance can’t be anything but happy that he’s choosing to humor this conversation.

“It’s pretty similar to living with all of you guys, actually. At least the castle has individual bathrooms and showers for each bedroom. We got the long end of the stick there.”

“Yeah.”

Lance uncrosses his ankles and pulls himself up onto the counter easily. Keith blinks up at him, obviously confused about why he did that, but no question comes. Lance says tentatively, “I…assume you’re an only child, right?”

Keith nods. “Yeah. It was…just me and my dad, growing up.”

That explains why he never knew about his Galra heritage, Lance thinks. He leans back until he’s propped up against the cabinets, head to the side to avoid hitting the metal handle, and pulls his legs up onto the counter, crossing them. He wasn’t going to push the topic any more than he already has—after all, it’s kind of a miracle Keith has chosen to say as much as he just did—but, to his surprise, Keith fidgets where he stands and continues.

“He disappeared a lot,” he says. “For…work. I don’t know what he did, or what he meant by that. I was just by myself a lot of the time. Enlisting in the Garrison wasn’t that big of a leap from being home, in terms of how much I saw him.”

“That’s…” Lance searches for the right word, but nothing adequate comes up. “Wow.”

Keith kind of laughs, the one that means he thinks something is cynically funny. Lance has heard this laugh from him a total of two other times. “Yeah. ‘Wow.’ It was…whatever.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“No.” From the tone of his voice, Lance wonders if he’s thinking about their conversation the other week, about it being okay to not be fine sometimes. “I don’t.”

Keith uncrosses his arms and lets them hang by his sides for a moment, before pulling himself up onto the counter too. This way, the two of them are side-by-side, a few inches between each other but close enough that Lance can feel Keith’s body heat. He’s warm, and it’s nice in the otherwise freezing castle. Lance doesn’t know if the castle is purposefully kept kind of chilly, or if it’s just a side effect of being constantly in the cold vacuum of space.

“I don’t know who my mom was,” Keith admits.

“You think she was Galra?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. But wouldn’t I look more Galra if I was that closely related to one?”

“You _are_ pretty human looking, you got me there,” Lance says. “But, I mean, hey, alien biology is always weird. Maybe you can shapeshift without realizing it or, like, maybe your mom shapeshifted and never showed your dad her Galra side so when you came out, it was like, ‘here’s a totally, completely human baby’.”

Keith laughs for the second time tonight, but this one is different. It’s not cynical. It almost sounds…genuine. Lance can’t help but smile at the knowledge that he pulled that from Keith, that _he_ was the one to make him laugh.

“Maybe,” he says, still smiling. The tips of his canines are visible when he smiles like this, and his teeth are so white, and oddly perfect. Lance wonders if he ever had braces or if he’s just a lucky bastard like that, and then he notices the soft outline of dimples on Keith’s cheeks. Lance wouldn’t admit this until recently, but Keith is…pretty. His smile in particular.

His stomach drops slightly when the smile slowly fades back into nothing, and he knows they’re returning to serious conversation.

“I think my dad knew, though,” he says. “Whatever…whatever she was. Pure Galra, half-Galra, one-fourth-Galra. I think he knew. He never talked about her, and he always got upset the moment I tried to ask.”

“Maybe it was too painful for him,” Lance offers softly.

Keith’s shoulders sag, and Lance doesn’t miss the way he tries to scoot over subtly, crossing his arms back over his chest. He’s putting that wall up again. Lance feels the tightrope pull tauter.

He says, “I’m sorry.”

Keith looks at him. “What? Why?”

“Because you had to grow up like that, and it sounds like it sucked,” Lance says. “I…can’t imagine having a family like that. I’m just…sorry.”

For a few moments, Keith is silent. He looks away, and from the corner of Lance’s eye he sees that Keith is staring at the ground, at his feet dangling over the side of the counter. There is so little space between the two of them but it feels like a canyon, like a hundred feet to bridge.

But Keith is still so warm.

“Don’t be,” Keith says. “It’s not your fault. It’s just how it was.”

“You’ve accepted it completely?”

“There’s not really much else I _can_ do but accept it.”

Lance watches Keith’s hands where they’re holding the side of the counter, his knuckles turning white then returning to their normal color as he tightens and untightens his grip. “I guess you’re right,” Lance concedes.

Still, he thinks it isn’t fair. That Keith had to live like that. That the only person who showed him real love disappeared not once, but twice.

 

\--

 

“The fact that you’re letting me do this is, just…amazing.”

“Don’t make me regret it,” Keith mumbles. He fidgets, and the towel tied around his neck shifts slightly. “If you’re going to be an ass about it, I can always leave and get someone else to do it, or just not do it at all. _You’re_ the only one that cares about my hair, anyway.”

Lance fixes the towel back in place again. “I don’t _care_ , but mullets have been out of style since the nineties, and you just want me to _not_ take that opportunity to roast you?”

“That’s it, I’m—“

“I’m kidding!” Even as Lance sets his hands on Keith’s shoulder to keep him from getting out of the chair, he’s laughing. “I’m just messing with you, c’mon, dude, it’s a joke. I’ll cut your hair and you won’t look like Uncle Jesse anymore, alright? Free of charge.”

“Who?”

“Are you telling me you’ve never seen _Full House_?”

If Keith weren’t facing away from him, he would be giving Lance that blank, confused look, Lance knows, the one he always gives when he’s out of the loop about pop culture. “Uh…no.”

“…Well. We’ll work on that.”

They’re in Keith’s room right now, Keith sitting in a chair facing away from Lance, while Lance stands behind him with combs and a pair of scissors he’d borrowed from Allura. It’s been a year since the paladins went into space, so this definitely isn’t the first time any of them have given or received a haircut, but this is the first time that Keith has come to Lance for it. Most of it’s probably because he saw the way Lance handled Hunk and Pidge’s hair, and came to the reluctant conclusion that Lance actually _does_ know what he’s doing when it comes to basic hairstyling.

Lance runs the comb through the back of Keith’s hair slowly, getting out any tangles he meets on the way; he’s careful not to pull too hard on his scalp and hurt him. Keith’s hair grew out when the rest of them weren’t looking, curling around his shoulders instead of resting at the back of his neck like it used to. The nickname “mullet” actually applies even more _now_ than it did back when Lance still called him that all the time.

Since piloting Red, Lance really has held back on the teasing, and the times he _does_ poke fun at Keith now is less out of genuine dislike and meant more as friendly banter. Their relationship is, of course, still weird and rocky and unstable, but it’s a more amiable unstable, at the very least.

Just a few months ago, Keith would’ve never let Lance anywhere near him with a pair of scissors. It’s a testimony to their growth that he’s doing so now, even if a little reluctantly.

“How short do you want it?” Lance asks, stopping at another tangle.

“Uh, I don’t know. I guess the same as it was when we got here.”

“Not picky, huh?”

“I will be if you say it like that again.”

Lance snorts. “I promise I won’t fuck up your hair. I’ll get it back to what it as before, no sweat. Just make sure to be still, okay?”

“Okay.”

He actually listens to Lance’s request and doesn’t move pretty much at all the entire time Lance gets the job done. A silence falls over them, the only sound the _snip_ as the blades cut off another piece and Lance’s humming as he works, but he finds that he doesn’t mind it so much. It’s not uncomfortable or awkward or weird. It just…is. 

Despite how little Keith takes care of himself, his hair is surprisingly soft, Lance notices as he holds a strand to cut in place with his index and middle finger. He would never admit it out loud, but he’s almost sad to see the length go. He was getting used to Keith’s hair like this, falling just barely to his shoulders. Other than Allura, he has the longest hair of all of them right now, beating even Pidge’s grown-out bob.  

It looked pretty good on him, actually.

When Lance is finished, the hair springs back into their curls at the base of Keith’s neck, returning to his original vaguely-mullet-esque look. Lance sets the comb and scissors on Keith’s bed and brushes off the few strands of hair that he’d gotten on himself in the process. “And viola, we’re done. And for _your_ side of the deal, time for you to clean this whole mess up.”

Keith takes the towel off from around his neck and gets up, reaching back to run his hands through his newly shortened hair. “Thanks,” he says, skimming over Lance’s reminder of his side of the agreement. “You…actually did a pretty okay job.”

“I did a _great_ job, excuse you.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You just don’t want to admit that I’m actually a master hairstylist.”

“How did you even learn to do this?” Keith asks suddenly.

“What, cut hair?”

He nods.

Lance shrugs. “Eight people in my family, remember? Getting your hair done is _crazy_ expensive when you have that many people in need of a cut, so I just taught myself how to do it. I practiced on wigs for a really long time before any of my sisters would let me near their hair, honestly, but I got a lot of practice and, you know, here I am now. And besides, it’s kind of fun.”

“Oh.” Keith blinks. He’s still playing with the curls at the nape of his neck, like he can’t believe it’s this length again. Lance remembers how soft it was, and for a moment, he wants to run his hands through the curls too.

But that’s definitely weird of him to think, he tells himself, and squashes the desire down, shoving it away to the back of his mind.

Keith continues, “That’s…that was really nice of you, actually.”

“Eh, it was mostly because of money,” Lance insists. “Other than that, though, I know how to bleach and dye hair, and I can do normal braids, French braids, and fishtails. Not super helpful for us out here, but just something that’s kinda cool to say I can do, I guess.”

Keith nods and repeats, “Oh.”

“Yeah. So. Anyway,” Lance says. “If that’s all you need me for, I guess I’ll just…you know. Leave you to it.”

He picks up the scissors and comb and starts towards the door, intending to give them right back to Allura now that they’ve served their intended purpose. Right before the door slides open for him, Keith calls after him, “You don’t…actually have to. If you don’t want to go, I mean.”

Lance stops and turns to face Keith. He thinks about asking _do you want me to stay?_ But he’s not sure if Keith, even if the answer was yes, would answer that question. So he asks instead, “Do _you_ want me to go?”

Keith pauses. For a moment, he is so vulnerable, so open, and for once not about his anger. Lance has started to learn the nuances of Keith’s expressions, his body language, but for this instant, he doesn’t even need to decode anything. It’s just laid bare.

“No,” he says.

 

\--

 

“Hey, girl.”

Blue purrs into Lance’s mind the moment he steps into her hangar. He smiles, elated that she responded to him so immediately despite not being her paladin for the time being.

“Glad to know you aren’t mad at me,” he says, coming up to stand in front of her. She has her barriers up, but he can still hear her speaking into his mind, saying something that might be _I am not_.

“I guess you and Allura are getting along good now?”

She purrs again.

“That’s great! I was a little worried since you had a rough start, but I’m glad to know you’re good now.” He moves closer to her, setting a hand on her barrier gently. If it were down, he would press his forehead to her arm, or her head if she would allow it. Blue and him were so close before; he would joke about them being “best buds” and the closest of the bunch, but he really did—does—love her. Lance’s heart is too big to mind-meld with a creature, go into battle together, and _not_ fall a little bit in love with her.

After battles or when they’d bonded he’d come up to her like this and press the palm of his hand to her metal, or his forehead to hers if she left him, and just sit there, feeling her in his mind. Her purring. How soft but strong-willed her presence in his brain felt, how close to him she was in those moments. If mind-melding with the other paladins was intrusive, sitting like this, only listening to Blue as she invaded his mind, was an entire other level of closeness.

Not that Lance ever really disliked it. Like he said, he loves her.

“Allura loves being your paladin,” he tells her softly. She says something in response that might mean _she is a good paladin_ , or something like it. Maybe “good” isn’t the best translation, but skilled, competent. The ideas-feeding-into-your-brain thing gets messed up a little bit on the way, sometimes.

Lance nods. “She’s pretty badass, yeah.”

_And Red?_ Blue asks.

Lance’s shoulders drop unconsciously. “Oh, we’re…good. She’s a lot different to fly than you, so, you know, it took me a little while to get used to. But we’re good. I miss you.”

_And you_.

“Can I confess something to you, Blue?”

_What is wrong?_

“I’m still not…used to this. And, I know I should treat this like it’s indefinite that I’m flying Red, like, I shouldn’t just…I mean. We _all_ want Shiro back. But I know we shouldn’t assume that that’s gonna happen, so I should treat this like a permanent set up. But I keep accidentally thinking about it like he’s gonna come back, you know? Like we’re just gonna wake up one day and he’ll be _here_ again.”

Lance sighs heavily, leaning his head against her barriers. He feels her reach out to him in comfort, just a bit.

“It’s been four months,” he mumbles. “I should…start to accept that he’s gone. We need to. But a part of me…”

_You do not want to give up hope,_ Blue finishes for him.

He laughs pitifully. “Yeah. I don’t.”

_Keith has not_.

“Of course he hasn’t. Keith is…well…I don't know what's up with them, but he’s the closest of us to Shiro. If I were in his place, I wouldn’t wanna accept it either. I’d try to hold onto hope for as long as I could. But…”

_But you are not in his place?_

“Aw, fuck, Blue, I don’t know.” He takes a deep breath. “Everything is weird and confusing right now. I just want things to be okay again.”

There’s a moment where she doesn’t respond to him, only reaching out in comfort as she lets him wallow in his confusion and grief. Then she says patiently, the way only Blue can: _Were things ever okay?_

 

\--

 

Five months after Shiro’s disappearance, Lance gets up in the middle of the night for something to calm his raging headache.

They don’t have Advil or anything like that on the ship to help him, but a while back, the team came across a tea-like drink on one of the trading planets they visited—much to all of their delight—and immediately stocked up on the bags. He makes himself a mug of almost-chamomile tea in hopes that it will get his head to stop pounding, or at least make him tired enough to sleep despite the pain.

The castle is asleep, or trying to be; even the motion-sensitive lights only turn on to their lowest setting when Lance heads down the hallway from the kitchen. He takes sips as he walks, the drink warm and comforting in the permanently freezing castle, and cradles the mug between his hands. He heard once that warm things like this simulate human touch and release endorphins. He never checked the validity of that statement, but he’d believe it.

As he passes the observation deck, there’s the sound of someone heaving. He stops. Is someone crying? Throwing up? Who’s even up at this time besides him? As quietly as he can, he slips into the observation deck.

It’s dark, and other than the glow from the holographic map and the stars outside the window there is no light, but Lance can still tell that it’s Keith sitting on the steps before the map with his back to the door, his body bowed into itself as his shoulders tremble. He’s crying, but other than that heaving like he can't catch his breath, no sound comes out. He stops moving abruptly when the door slides shut behind Lance.

There’s silence. Lance takes a step into the room, still holding his mug in both hands, and says gently, testing the waters, “Hey.”

Keith still isn’t facing him, but Lance sees him bring his hands up to his cheeks, furiously scrubbing away any tears. Without turning around, he says, his voice a little hoarse, “Hey.”

Lance moves slowly across the room, giving Keith time to say or do something if Lance’s presence isn’t wanted, but he doesn’t give indication that’s the case, even when Lance takes a seat next to him. He makes sure to leave a good distance between the two of them in case Keith doesn’t want to be close to anybody right now. Lance would get it if that were the case. Personally, he’s always been a tactile person, especially when upset, but he knows how Keith is, knows it’s best just to play it safe for the time being.

When neither of them says anything, Lance faces Keith and holds out his mug. “Want some?”

Keith blinks at him, then at the mug in his outstretched hand. It’s still half full and _very_ warm. Even if the thing about imitating human touch turns out to not be true, Lance thinks, it still can’t hurt anything if he’s trying to comfort Keith, right?

Hesitantly, Keith takes the mug from Lance. Their fingers brush on the way. “What is this?” he asks, looking down at the contents. His voice is still hoarse, and from this angle, the hologram’s light shines on his face and illuminates how wet his cheeks still are, how watery his eyes.

“Chamomile tea,” Lance says, watching Keith as he takes a tentative first sip. “Well, not _really_ , but. The space equivalent.”

“Space tea,” Keith says. He doesn’t seem to hate the taste when he pulls back.

“Spa-tea. Wait, no.” Lance frowns. “That one doesn’t work.”

Keith raises the mug to his lips again, hiding the beginnings of a smile, and Lance can’t help how happy it makes him, knowing that he’s getting Keith to _smile_ right now, when he’d just been crying all alone in the dark at God knows what hour of the night. His happiness dissipates some, though, with the thought that Keith was just _here_ , alone. How long was he crying before Lance came in? Is this the first time he’s done this, or have there been more instances, others where no one else happened to be wandering around to find him and offer him comfort?

“That one was horrible,” Keith tells him. Lance notices that Keith cradles the mug the same way he does, both hands cupped around the sides with his left through the handle. Human touch.

“I’ve definitely done better,” Lance agrees. And when he can think of nothing else, he asks, “Do you like it?”

“The tea?”

“Yeah.”

Keith nods. “It’s good.” He seems to remember that it was Lance’s originally, and un-cups his hands, starting to give it back. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to take it from you—“

“No, no, it’s totally fine, I can just make myself some more on my way to bed,” Lance assures, pushing the mug back towards Keith, who reluctantly accepts it again. “I was really just trying to get something to kill this massive headache I have, anyway. You’d think Alteans would have healing technology for, like, smaller things, but nooo, I have to be on the brink of death before I can get anything healed. Even just some painkiller would be nice.”

“Why do you have a headache?”

He shrugs. “Prolonged stress, bad sleeping habits, and bad eating habits, maybe?”

“…Oh. That makes sense.” Keith takes another sip. It could just be the lighting playing tricks, but Lance thinks his eyes are still bloodshot, his cheeks redder than usual. He thinks about the few seconds before the door shut, when Keith was hiccuping and his shoulders were shaking so visibly. It’s the most vulnerable Lance thinks he’s ever seen him, and some part of him is scared by it.

Pidge has cried over it. Lance has seen Allura and Coran hurriedly wipe away a few tears. Hunk has relayed in detail all his fear and concern and pain to Lance more than once in the past five months, and Lance of course relayed his own in return.

But Keith.

Keith is the only one none of them have seen process it. The only one who they’ve never seen cry. All his grief, as badly hidden as it was, was covered in his anger.

But it’s here, now. It’s just laid bare.

There’s silence, and more silence.

Lance says, "You two were close."

Keith chokes out a sob, and that’s all it takes before he’s given up trying to hide that he feels this just as much as the rest of them, before he’s laying it all out for Lance on the observation deck. He hiccups when he cries, the only person Lance has ever met who actually does that, and he looks so small when he shudders through his sobs, and Lance takes the mug from him gently before it can slip through his hands.

One of them—he’s not sure who—bridges the gap between them. Lance rests his arm around Keith while he cries, gentle enough to allow him to pull away if he wants to but firm enough to let him know Lance is there, but Keith doesn’t pull away. He leans further into the touch, his head down and his shoulders hunched, and they stay like that on the deck, Keith hiccupping and rubbing his tears away as quickly as they can fall, Lance tightening his arm around Keith’s shoulder to let him know he’s here.

He’s here.

“Yes,” Keith gasps when he’s finally stopped crying enough to speak. “ _Yes_.”

**Author's Note:**

> mmmmmm feedback is always loved and appreciated espesh w/ this one bc i. cant quite tell how i did on characterization ? i struggled w/ that a lot. anyway. thank u for reading!!!


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